Best Alternative Christmas Playlist!

(Nigella, Delia or Mary *Part 2)
We all like to think we have the best taste in music…well, I’m no different!
A couple of years ago my fella & I started to put together our favourite Christmas songs into a list so that we could feel MASSIVELY festive without having to listen to Mariah.

When I decided to bake the first Christmas cake, we put this on whilst the fruit was soaking and then again the next day when I was putting the cake together. It’s a mix of classics, alternatives and oldies so hopefully there’s something new for everyone to enjoy.

If you know a great song that I might not have heard before, I’d love to hear it! Ping me a message or link via your fave social media and I’ll have a listen.

I’ve copied the Spotify link for our playlist below so that you can listen whilst you bake your own cake!

If you don’t have Spotify, these are my top 5 alternative (and not so alternative) Christmas songs:

  1. The Darkness, Christmas Time (Don’t Let the Bells End)
  2. Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Frosty the Red-Nosed Snowman
  3. Sufjan Stevens, O Come O Come Emmanuel
  4. Björk, Frosti
  5. Low, Just like Christmas

ENJOY!!

Now down to the cake! This time I baked Mary Berry’s traditional Christmas cake – you can find the recipe here.

The first thing that was different this week was that Mary wanted me to soak the fruit for 3 days…well, I only saw that on Saturday night, so it got a couple of days (sorry Mary!) but I did tweek the recipe to compensate by using about 3/4 of a bottle of Gluhbier rather than a meagre 150mls. I like to have the fruit nice and plump, and at the end of the day we have a brewery so there’s no need to skimp on the liquor 😉 ! All the liquid was soaked up, so there was nothing to tip away.

I also forgot to take the butter out of the fridge (ugh rookie error!) so I had a full on battle to cream the butter, sugar, eggs, treacle & almonds. Mixing in everything at once complicated the issue and I think I ended up with tiny butter blobs even after my best efforts, so we’ll see if that impacts the cake in any way. *TOP TIP* cream the sugar and butter together first before adding anything else if you’ve got cold butter. You can also cut it into small pieces on the counter and come back to it (if you have time) to allow it to warm a little. DO NOT MICROWAVE IT!

Mary’s batter was a lot easier to handle than Nigella’s last week, and I loved Mary’s simple throw it all in method, however I did notice that the baking cake didn’t fill the house with delicious festive fragrance as much as it did with Nigella’s recipe so it’ll be interesting to see how the taste reflects that. Mary’s baking times were also wildly different to what happened in my world: We were all done in about an hour and a half, so again be sure to check your cake nice and early to avoid burning and tears.

Brightside brewing Gluhbier 4.5% 500ml bottle held in a ladies with teal garmin watch hand ready to be used to mix with raisins